Vectors

The word vector comes from the Latin term vehere, to carry. In Biology, a vector is an agent which carries disease, such as a mosquito carrying infected blood from one patient to the next.

In mathematics, a vector is a quantity which has both a magnitude and a direction associated with it. The most commonly used example of vectors in everyday life is velocity. When you drive your car, your speedometer tells you the speed of your car, but it doesn't tell you where you are going. The combination of both where you are going and how fast you are going there is your car's velocity.

An object's position is also a vector, though this is sometimes confusing. The reason position is a vector is that an object's position must be defined relative to some other position, and in the difference between the object's position and the reference position, we have both a distance and a direction.